Blockchain offers significant potential for transforming healthcare processes, but few concepts have moved from just a vision to a stage where true benefits can be realized. That’s about to change. At HIMSS, Change Healthcare will be introducing a new Payments Blockchain proof-of-concept (PoC) which was developed by our provider payments team. The re-engineered payment process is powered by a distributed ledger, and is designed to reduce the disparate entries that exist in today’s disconnected and legacy payment processes. The Payments Blockchain PoC kicks open the door for a streamlined, smart, and secure payment process that payers and providers can only dream about today.

On today’s show, we interview the Change Healthcare and Digital Asset team that’s come together to build this new Payments Blockchain. On the panel: Gopi Devalcheruvu, the vice president of technology for Change Healthcare; Vinod Nair, the director of product management for Change Healthcare; and Dan O’Prey, chief marketing officer for Digital Asset. Listen now to hear what this group of experts has to say about blockchain for healthcare. The panel discusses:

The backstory and development of the Payments Blockchain proof-of-concept

How the Payments Blockchain works

What the future of healthcare payment might look like

Predictions for the evolution of blockchain in healthcare

The payment blockchain’s potential for encouraging a wave of new capabilities for payers, providers, and partners

How the Payments Blockchain is enabled by the Change Healthcare payment network

Rich Levin: Welcome to EOB, Explanation of Blockchain. I’m Rich Levin, your host for today’s show. Blockchain technology offers significant potential for transforming healthcare processes, but few concepts have moved from just a vision to a stage where true benefits can be realized. That’s about to change. At HIMSS this year, Change Healthcare will be introducing their new payment blockchain proof of concept which was developed by their provider payments team. The re-engineered payment process is powered by a distributed ledger and is designed to reduce the disparate entries that exist in today’s disconnected and frankly legacy payment processes. The blockchain solution kicks open the door for a streamlined, smart, and secure payment process that payers and providers can only dream about today. On today’s show, I interview the Change Healthcare and Digital Asset team that’s come together to build this new payment blockchain. We’ll discuss its development, how it works, what the future of healthcare payment looks like, what they predict for the evolution of blockchain in healthcare, and the payment blockchain’s potential for opening up a new wave of capabilities for payers, providers, and partners through the Change Healthcare payment network. On the panel today Gopi Devalcheruvu, the vice president of technology for Change Healthcare, Vinod Nair, the director of product management for Change Healthcare, and Dan O’Prey, chief marketing officer for Digital Asset. And now let’s hear what this group of experts has to say about blockchain for healthcare. I’d like to welcome everybody to the program. And before we start, let’s go around the table and introduce each person who’s on the panel today. Gopi, I’d like you to go first. And if you could just introduce yourself and tell folks who you are and who you work for and what you do?

(01:55)

Gopi: Thank you Rich. This is Gopi Devalcheruvu. I’m the vice president of payment engineering at Change Healthcare.

Rich: And what do you do? What’s your team working on? Without getting into the specifics we’ll talk about today, but in general what’s your day like and what are your objectives in the Change Healthcare organization?

Gopi: So in Change Healthcare, we manage a payments network for all the entities in the healthcare system, payers, providers, and members. They use our healthcare payments network to transact and transfer money between all the entities. And it’s a pretty substantial amount of money we move every day in our U.S. healthcare system.

Rich: And folks, the actual data on that we will have up on the podcast post in terms of the scale and the scope of Change Healthcare’s operations. You can look that up in the podcast description. Vinod, why don’t you tell us your role, your title, and what you are doing at Change Healthcare.

(02:52)

Vinod: Thank you Rich. My name is Vinod Nair. I’m the director of product management working for platform product management. And my responsibility is to take care of the product management activities for our payments business. And I work really closely with Gopi and his team. So primarily, business decides where we want to invest our money in terms of building our payment capability. And then it’s my responsibility to take that and break it down for our engineering team so that we can build world-class payment products.

Rich: Great. And Dan, tell us a little bit about your organization and your role.

(03:30)

Dan: Thank you Rich. Delighted to be invited onto the show. I’m Dan O’Prey. I’m the CMO at Digital Assets. I run all things marketing and partnerships globally. Digital Assets have developed distributed ledger technology which is often referred to as blockchain to enable innovative companies like Change Healthcare to use our tools and really accelerate change in their markets. The main component of what we’ve developed is DAML, which is a smart contract language specifically for multiparty business processers. Before Digital Asset, I was a co-founder and CEO of a company called Hyperledger, which was acquired by Digital Asset about three years ago. So I’ve been in the blockchain space for about five years now.

Rich: Well thank you very much. So let me tee this up for our listeners. Why are we here today and what are we talking about? What’s the news here? We’re talking about a proof of concept that everyone on the call today has been working on. Who would like to take a stab at just setting the stage here of what we’re talking about today and why we’re talking about it today? Gopi, Vinod, Dan? Anyone want to take a stab at that?

(04:36)

Vinod: Rich, this is Vinod. I will take a first stab at this. If you look at the healthcare payments space. Change Healthcare is a payment facilitator. We help health plans pay healthcare providers. But during this process, we will have to receive payment instructions from our payers and go out to garner those funds from the payers’ bank account into a consolidated bank account, and then disburse it to providers’ bank accounts. So, as you can see, facilitation of a healthcare payment involves several banks, payment processes, and other intermediaries orchestrating a complex workflow and, piece by piece, help disparate systems, and they communicate with batch files. So there is a problem that exists in this space. And what we’ve done with this POC is we’ve tried to solve it by using technology, specifically blockchain technology. We tried to provide with this POC that we can put that technology to solve a real business problem.

Rich: So, let’s back up just a little bit Vinod. You mentioned the POC. So, I assume that means proof of concept. So we’re talking about a proof of concept that’s been built at Change Healthcare, I assume in partnership with Digital Asset?

(05:48)

Gopi: Yeah Rich. This is Gopi here. So, let me elaborate a little bit about what Vinod shared and a little bit about the POC. So, Vinod highlighted a couple of the key challenges in our current payment process, which is the lack of transparency as well as the operational complexity of processing payments by payers and providers. So what we did in this POC, working with our partners at Digital Asset, is used the distributed ledger technology to take a use case of a payer making a payment to a provider through a push-to-card payment mechanism and we were able to pretty much show the payment flow all the way from getting a payment instruction from a payer all the way to a provider receiving it. And there are multiple parties involved in this payment transaction. The payer, the provider, the bank, Change Healthcare, the payment processor. So, using the distributed ledger and the smart contracts, we were able to provide, address some of this challenge of which we know.

Rich: So in a nutshell, you’ve taken the existing or let’s call it the current payment process that exists in healthcare, and you’ve developed a payments blockchain for want of a better term. Proof of concept that re-engineers and streamlines that process?

(07:12)

Gopi: Exactly. That’s exactly what we’ve done. And we’ve been able to provide real time view into the payment status, which is very difficult to get today, as well as simplify some of the complexities that are on operations with a reconciliation of this payment. So those were some of our key objectives for us in terms of really providing value and benefit to all the healthcare participants.

Rich: You talked about the complexities. What are the complexities? What are the challenges in the traditional or let’s call it the current payment process? Because the current payment processes out there—it’s working every day. What’s wrong with it? Why is it broken? Why reinvent it?

Vinod: This is Vinod. So the current payment process is out there working. It’s not broken. But if you look at it, we are relying on disparate batch file transfer of payment status. So my payment would have posted to my bank account, but I wouldn’t know it until tomorrow morning. Between now and tomorrow morning, there could be some event that’s happening and that might have a real-time revenue impact on my business. Or, in some cases, it’s even compliant issues that can happen when it’s a healthcare provider.

Gopi: Or Vinod, it could be a customer experience issue too—a provider doesn’t receive payment for something a member or customer has visited.

(08:42)

Vinod: That’s correct. So the process is working Rich, but making a real-time status available, you’re helping the providers. So they could reduce some of the complex operational workflows that they use to post it and speed up their revenue cycle management.

Rich: It sounds to me, to parse that out, that we have a payment process that was built or engineered on overtime layer by layer. The goals have changed. The business objectives have changed. The world has changed. And we have new requirements that payers and providers are trying to accomplish in, when we’re recording this in 2019 as we go forward, weren’t even thought about when the original or the current payment process that is widely used today evolved over many, many generations. How can blockchain and smart contracts, which are, I guess, at the highest level what we’re talking about here, in terms of using blockchain and smart contracts to re-engineer the payment process, how can blockchain and smart contracts solve these challenges that have not been able to be solved before? They weren’t necessarily the business objectives of the current model and they are the business objectives today.

Gopi: Yeah. That’s a very good question, Rich. So as you very well highlighted, the current processes are all built over multiple decades. There’s a lot of legacy systems and processes, which have been involved. But as you know, the cost of healthcare, the need to provide a great customer experience, really requires all the parties in this payment flow to really collaborate and partner together to provide a seamless experience, whether it’s for the customer or the provider or the payer. So what we have done is we actually bring all of these parties together in the blockchain to collaborate and communicate using the distributed ledger technology so that each of the parties involved in the payment flow knows exactly where things are and where the money is. What’s the next step in the payment process so that they have the real-time visibility to the payment status, which is a key challenge, which we don’t highlight it. The other thing that we have also done is to really simplify things. Over the years, we have accumulated lots of legacy systems and protocols. We are trying to simplify all of that by using smart contracts. So smart contracts, in a very simple way, are a way for us to encapsulate all the business logic between the different parties, to say, under what conditions would the money be transferred, how much time they would wait for a settlement to happen. You know, there’s a lot of steps in this process, which we are able to now use the DAML, which Dan talked about in a very simple way so that these business rules can be encapsulated between the multiple parties involved and it really streamlines the whole process and brings greater efficiencies as well.

(11:51)

Rich: So let’s talk about a follow up question for you Gopi. Let’s talk about what blockchain specifically brings to the equation. And when people hear blockchain, I think anybody in healthcare IT knows that you can’t have a conversation with people who are either building solutions or selling solutions that are involved in blockchain where you don’t get to the part of why it’s really difficult to educate the marketplace on this, because when people hear blockchain they think Bitcoin. They just don’t get the connection between blockchain and how the impact can be on claims processing or on healthcare IT overall and the payment process. What specifically does blockchain bring to the table? And then Dan, I’m going to turn to you after this because I want to talk to about what smart contracts bring. But let’s focus just, let’s break it down for the audience one piece at a time. Let’s talk about why blockchain? And what does it bring to the equation?

Gopi: Blockchain at the very elementary level brings distributed ledger. So think about this. We have all these parties today; they’ve been interacting using files and many different mechanisms, which are less than optimal. Now we have the ability using the distributed ledger to get all these parties to work together in spite of their different systems and processes to really collaborate in real time on this payment. So that’s the game changer here. So we’re able to bring disparate systems, disparate organizations, disparate partners together to collaborate on this one payment flow where the complete transparency as far as where is the payment, what are the steps in the payment, and those are all automatically executed using smart contracts. So we all can easily define under what conditions should the payments be processed. How do we handle exceptions? What happens for settlement? So we have the full view just like in our bitcoin where you can see who owns the bitcoin, what were the transactions which are happening. We can bring the same kind of visibility and transparency to all the healthcare payments. That’s huge.

(14:01)

Rich: Dan, what role to smart contracts play? And let’s back up a little bit and just start by defining what is a smart contract? What do we mean by that?

Dan: Sure. So I think the simple explanation of blockchain and smart contracts are that blockchain’s already on everyone agreeing to what the state of the world is today, and being able to see that and agree to it and see who did what that led to that state. So we can all agree on the current status. Smart contracts really are the way that we all can agree upon how that state can change going forward. So you think of blockchain as today and the past, and smart contracts as the future. How would we update that status, and all agree upon that? Which rules can we do it under? And how do we automate where we can so that we can have things like straight-through processing? So smart contracts really are essentially computer programs. But the big difference between how they’re done, the computer programs are done today, and how they can be done with smart contracts is, as Gopi mentioned, today in the existing system, every entity in that process–the payers, the providers, the clearinghouses, the corresponding banks—they each run their own systems and communicate via messages. So you’ll get an incoming message. You’ll have to interpret that and understand what that means with your own systems and install that in a format that you use internally. Smart contracts enable you to actually collaborate, as Gopi said, across the market so that everyone can agree on what the rules of the market are and who can do what when. And then automate through that so you can actually much more quickly not just see the status but see what will happen under what conditions.

Rich: Is this rules-based intelligence that is triggered when certain environmental conditions happen across the payment process? And then executes that rule or checks the data or does something at a certain time and lays latent until then? And is this, if I’m a payer or a provider, how does this affect me in terms when you say contract, is this the relationship between the payer and the provider that then gets defined and deployed throughout this network, and then is executed to ensure that the agreed upon terms are played out as the payments roll?

(16:21)

Dan: This is Dan. So there are a lot of different implementations of smart contracts and they work very differently in very different systems. So it’s hard to talk about them as a single entity. Gopi mentioned Bitcoin earlier, which has a very, very crude form of smart contract and everything is completely public. In the permission system, obviously dealing with markets like healthcare privacy is of utmost importance. So it’s a way that you can see across all the entities that are involved in a business process. They can all see their stage or the data or the process that pertains to them and automate that through them, but without seeing any data that they’re not entitled to see as well. So it’s a way to encapsulate business processes and code. A way for each entity within a certain market to play the current role that they do. And for that code to actually enforce the rules and make sure that everyone knows that someone hasn’t misbehaved, or a piece of important data wasn’t being dropped along that process.

Rich: Dan, I heard DAML or D.A.M.L. if I’m getting that right, mentioned in the context of implementing the smart contract. What is DAML? What’s it stand for? How’s it work? Why should listeners care about it?

Dan: So DAML is Digital Asset’s Modeling Language. That’s what the initialism’s for. It’s a smart contract language that we’ve created specifically for business use. So it’s similar in some ways to more well-known smart contract languages such as Solidity or Ethereum, but there are a lot of issues with the public blockchain smart contract languages over privacy, over some bugs, which have led to some undesirable outcomes, shall we say. DAML really forces some constraints on the developer. But by doing so actually abstracts away all the underlying complexities of writing an application that runs on a blockchain. So it’s special built for what is called smart contracts, which is really a bit of a misnomer as it can be applied to any form of business process, whether contractual or not, to enable people to write down what are the rights and obligations that certain entities have under certain conditions. So it’s very much a purpose-built, very specific for business processes, and allows businesses to actually develop these types of applications much faster and much more safely.

(18:56)

Rich: Dan, what excites you most about the potential of this technology and the work Change Healthcare and Digital Asset is doing together on this proof of concept for blockchain payment?

Dan: So I’m very excited about the future of this technology. I think the project with Change Healthcare has been a huge step forward in its own right, solving the tangible business challenges that exist today that Vinod and Gopi both outlined earlier. I think it gets even more exciting when you think about the implications of this project and the future and what can come from it. So not only can we streamline the push to cards payment process across payers, Change Healthcare, the payers correspondent bank, the providers correspondent bank, and the providers themselves, but since these business processes are modeled in DAML, they’re easy to expand and you can really plug and play networks that Change can build upon and that participants can build upon to actually integrate into other services. So the payment legs themselves could be brought on ledger in the future or claims adjudication or any other workflows that lead to those payment instructions. So you can actually expand out from this initial POC to multiple other different peripheral business processes as well. So this would provide each entity with player real-time visibility into the status of the process end-to-end in a very auditable way from origination all the way to settlement potentially. And so it’s this sort of connecting of what are currently very disparate, siloed, mostly internal business processes into one sort of large, shared, collaborative network that others can build and extend upon whether that’s in a distributed nature or even at building their business processes back into their own internal systems. And so it’s very exciting about the future potential and we’re delighted to have worked with Change Healthcare to bring this POC to life.

(21:02)

Gopi: I was going to add to what Dan shared. Our experience with DAML has been really easy to learn. And as he mentioned about to really specify the business processes and the business rules, it has been very easy, and I can feel the tremendous potential in its flexibility because the payments exist in a larger claims process or a revenue management process. How we can expand what we have done in DAML and to effectively process and really manage that within our distributed ledger, I see tremendous potential.

Rich: Gopi, let’s drill down into that a little bit. Where are we at on the proof of concept? And what specifically is Change Healthcare doing to address the payments process with blockchain and smart contract? We talked about the issues. We talked about the problems we can solve. But where are we at on the POC and what are we doing to address the problem from a practical innovation standpoint?

Gopi: So Rich, what we have done is first, primarily done this push-to-card payments use case from a payer to a provider. Now we are doing some more work on some of the non-functional aspects of a solution like this. But our vision is ultimately to aid the technology and embed it within a payments platform so that any payment flow within our healthcare payments network can take advantage of the smart contracts, the distributed ledger, to provide the real-time status and visibility and the collaboration capability at a platform level within Change Healthcare and with all of our partners, whether it’s payers, providers, or members. That’s our vision. So our goal is next to kind of finish up our POC within our non-functional requirements and then make it part of our payment platform.

(22:54)

Rich: And would it play nice with others? Would this be working concurrently in the network with the existing payment process? Would this be–how do you visualize this being offered to the market? And we may be getting ahead of ourselves here, but I’d love to know, what does the proof of concept see for how this plays out when it actually becomes productized? And I’ll just give the caveat to the audience–that may not happen that way. We’re talking about this at the proof of concept stage. Go ahead.

Gopi: So that’s one of the key nonfunctional requirements. Two is, how will our partners of who we work today, how would they integrate with this? So that’s a key part. We are very encouraged because one, it’s a very open architecture so we have many different ways it could attract. I know not everyone, all parties in a payment flow, can completely embrace the new technology. There could be some timing and adoption constraints each party may have. So there are different ways where they could even use the KPI’s to collect in real time. Or if they still want to send us some data in a more batch-oriented fashion on an interim basis before they fully adopt the real time capabilities, they could do that as well. So those are some of the things we are working actively with our financial banking partners as well as payers and others to really see what is the best model. But clearly we see that extensibility and open architecture to be a big plus.

Rich: Dan, some of this might be an obvious question but I’ll ask it anyway. What role does Digital Asset have with the proof of concept? Clearly, it’s around smart contracts and DAML. But can you drill in there?

(24:31)

Dan: Sure. So there’s our other technology provider for the project. So working with Change Healthcare to give them the tools, the platform, and the infrastructure and training in order to build the push-to-cards payments via proof of concept. So Change Healthcare were an early member of our development program so they’ve got access to the DAML software development kit, SDK, and training around the language itself where our engineers and their engineers sat around a table and really learned how to write these smart contracts in DAML and how to think about architecting smart contract applications. We were really delighted to collaborate with Change Healthcare on this. They’re really exactly the kind of partner that we look to work with. They’re a major player within the healthcare space, able to actually effectuate change within that market. They had a very clearly defined business case and real challenges that you heard earlier that can actually be solved by smart contracts, which is actually one of the hardest things to determine in this process, is what are the pain points specifically that we are trying to solve? And then also the team are very savvy engineers as well that have picked up DAML extremely quickly and were able to independently build the application. So we provided Gopi and Vinod’s team with dedicated training, which included a range of topics as to which business problems are suitable for the technology as well as the handle and coding. And in addition, we also provided early access to the DAML pass, which is a platform as a service. So there’s a cloud-hosted offering operated by Digital Asset on Google Cloud that Change Healthcare can use to actually build and test their POC directly against a real platform hosted in the cloud. We also provided some support throughout the engagement. So it’s important to note here that Change Healthcare were able to very impressively, incredibly rapidly, prototype this use case and actually deploy it in a very short time, which is one of the biggest things I’m most excited about this technology. The potential to reduce the time to market for new applications and to increase the agility of making changes over time or adding new products and services is one of the biggest things that excite me as well.

(26:52)

Rich: I’d like to throw the next question open to the full panel because now we’re getting down to the brass tacks. And I’d like to hear from everybody what you see as the biggest challenges to moving this technology out, getting adoption in the marketplace, and its suitability to healthcare, which at one level you could say, is pretty darn obvious especially, and I want the audience to know I’m going to put some slides up on the podcast description where we have models of the current payment process and the blockchain payment process. And you need only look at these two to see the streamlining effect. So it’s somewhat obvious in terms of its suitability to healthcare. But I’ll ask the question. So I’d just like to go around the table. What do you see is the biggest challenge? You’ve got the proof of concept. What are the biggest challenges to rolling this out? Getting it adopted by payers and providers? And its suitability to healthcare?

Vinod: Rich, this is Vinod. I will go first. One of the main challenges I see in deploying this out to the market is when we hear the word blockchain people associate it with Bitcoin. They’re not doing anything with Bitcoin. So that is an education that we need to do in terms of the smart contracts and the streamlining of technology that Gopi and Dan talked about. And the second challenge that I see from a product management perspective is the fact that we’re dealing with healthcare payers and these are large organizations with a lot of big staff and a lot of legacy processes. So having them to dedicate participate in the blockchain, there might be some challenges there. But like Gopi mentioned, that’s why we are looking at, can you communicate with the batch file and still be part of the network? This technology provides that flexibility. So that’s exciting. But primarily the big challenges are blockchain immediately associated with Bitcoin and then people have a bit of an apprehension to get it. And the second one is we’re talking about healthcare payers and getting them to dedicate participate.

(29:04)

Rich: So let me nutshell that and tell me if you agree and then we’ll go to the next response. But you’re talking about it’s a perception problem. So we need to continue to educate the marketplace. And it’s an inertia problem, which we’ve been dealing with in healthcare for a long time.

Vinod: Absolutely. Yes.

Dan: This is Dan. I would add to that, that part of that perception problem of blockchain being associated with Bitcoin and the so-called public networks really are around, from a technology perspective, around privacy and scale. Bitcoin is open to everyone. Everyone can see every single transaction. Everyone can see every update to the ledger. And scalability as well. These open, public, decentralized networks are really trying to be censorship resistant and that decentralization that is inherent in these systems, massive decentralization makes it incredibly hard to scale the throughput of the technology itself. So obviously none of that actually applies at all to what we’re talking about here with this POC or with most of the technologies that are being adopted by real commerce today. But privacy and scale are two prerequisites for any technology and especially true in healthcare. So not all smart contract and blockchain platforms are the same. They each have different approaches to preserving privacy. And often scale challenges are hard to see in the early stages of development and you actually sort of come and hit these much later on when you already may be too far down the road to make material changes. So the smart contract languages that have enforced the privacy constraints can also be a challenge in the scaling them up as well. We were very excited recently. We actually had two independent studies conducted on performance. One by Accenture and one by GFP that showed that our platform can scale to process even the largest equity markets in the world. Volumes are some of the most demanding. So we’re confident that both from privacy and scale that the technology is ready and can actually exceed the requirements of the healthcare market as well.

Rich: Gopi?

(31:22)

Gopi: I think to what we know that Dan shared, I think really getting our partners to adopt this technology is going to be, I think, a challenge and something we need to work on. I think from two different angles. One, making the benefits of it very clear so that we’re doing this for the benefit it offers, not just the technology. The second part is making the technology adoption easy. So for example, I really see by making this part of our payments platform, a lot of the complexity or integration challenges we can take it away from our partners so that they can easily see whether it’s FAS or API’s. They could, depending on the level of comfort, they can start embracing the platform which brings these benefits. So I think that’s kind of the challenge we need to work on to really get partners on to this platform and to really use the smart contracts as the distributed ledger to drive those benefits so then it’ll be a real win-win.

Rich: So here’s my final question to the panel. How do we go from proof of concept to RFP if I’m a payer or a provider? What should payers or providers be doing? Listening to this right now, it’s a proof of concept. What are the actions the should be taking right now? What are the actions that they should be anticipating? What are the questions they should be asking about this as we go forward?

Vinod: So Rich, again, this is Vinod. I’ll go first. So payers and providers, they don’t have to do anything if our partners are willing to participate with us on this program. Payers and providers will immediately see the benefit by having this real-time view of the payment statuses on the Change Healthcare payment network. But if they’re willing to participate in the network, then the benefits will be even more. As Dan mentioned, they could implement the payment status of smart contracts on other workflows such as claims processing and get the ultimate benefit. But even without participating, they should see the benefits of the implementation.

(33:28)

Dan: This isn’t too much of a plug, but if they do want to familiarize themselves with DAML, they can go to DAML.com and download the SDK so they can actually get ahead of them as the market moves in that direction. So they can understand what exactly they can do and how can they extend this in the future if they do decide to join the network.

Gopi: I would agree with that. And also, getting familiar with some of the concepts so the adoption becomes easier. So we want to make it easy by exposing most of through API’s. So that will make it easier for payers and providers to say, there it is. Bringing the power of the real-time views into their mobile apps or how are they wanting track. There are many different possibilities they can explore.

Rich: I guess I do have one more question. In thinking about this and putting ourselves in the shoes of a payer or a provider, I would say both because there may be different answers depending upon what role you’re in in the payment continuum, what are the questions that they should be asking? You know Dan, you talked about security, privacy, and scale. This is a new way to process payment. They know what questions to ask about the existing model and the legacy models. What are the questions that they should be asking about the payments blockchain model? Anyone?

(34:50)

Gopi: So I think again, I think it’s a lot of questions about the current business processes. Now with the ability to get more real-time information and preview the reconciliation and settlement complexity, there may be many more things they could do and provide a greater customer experience. So I think payment is just one part of it. But it’s part of overall customer experience. And I think they can really look for new avenues to improve that.

Vinod: Yeah. Just to add to what Gopi said, the question isn’t really, what should the payers and providers be asking? The question is, how can we educate them on the benefits and make them realize changing the payment process we’re just making it efficient. So just to tell them nothing is changing. It’s just becoming more efficient. From that point onwards, it’s like they don’t have a question because the payment is still the same.

Rich: Dan?

(35:53)

Dan: I think that the technology is ready. It is mostly as my panelists have mentioned an education challenge. The technology’s been proved out by independent studies and some of the largest, most demanding providers in the world across financial services and healthcare and other industries. So getting hands-on experience with the technology, playing with it themselves, and really starting to think what does this mean to my business on day one, it’s just a much more efficient way to do things. But in the future, there may be opportunities to really leverage this wealth of structured, clean, auditable data that is coming out of these systems in order to build entirely new products or services that they can offer to their end customers. So getting ahead of that, getting that understanding, getting over the education hump, I think is the next key steps.

Rich: Any parting shots? Anything that I didn’t give you an opportunity to address?

(36:56)

Gopi: So I would just say Rich, that it’s really exciting times. And we have had a phenomenal partnership with Digital Asset and adopting DAML has been really easy for us. And I can see tremendous potential in kind of driving the benefits and addressing some of the challenges we discussed today.

Dan: Yeah. Likewise. We very much enjoyed the collaboration with Change Healthcare. It’s been incredibly fruitful and productive and we’re very excited to talk publicly about the use case, this proof of concept.

Vinod: Yeah. Rich, I totally agree with both Gopi and Dan. Working on this proof of concept has been really exciting and I really enjoyed the whole ride.

Rich: Fantastic. Well I want to thank everybody for joining us today on the program. To our listeners, hit the podcast description, grab those resources, and get in touch with us if you have any more questions and stay tuned to the show for more on blockchain in healthcare.

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